American novelist
Ellen Douglas |
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| Born | Josephine Ayres Haxton
July 12, 1921
Natchez, Mississippi |
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| Died | November 7, 2012 |
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| Nationality | American |
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| Alma mater | University of Mississippi |
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| Notable works | A Family's Affairs (1961)
Black Cloud, White Cloud (1963)
Apostles of Light (1973)
The Rock Cried Out (1979) |
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| Children | Ayres Haxton, Brooks Haxton, Richard Haxton[1] |
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Ellen Douglas was the pen name of Josephine Ayres Haxton (July 12, 1921 – November 7, 2012), an American author.[2] Her 1973 novel Apostles of Light was a National Book Award nominee.
Biography
Douglas was born in Natchez, Mississippi, and grew up in Hope, Arkansas, and Alexandria, Louisiana. She graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1942 and later settled in Greenville, Mississippi with her husband Kenneth Haxton.[3] She had three sons with Haxton: Richard, Ayres, and Brooks Haxton,[4] the latter a notable, award-winning poet and writer.
Douglas taught writing at Ole' Miss, where she was writer-in-residence from 1979 to 1983.[4] One of her creative writing students was Larry Brown, a local Oxford firefighter who went on to publish many acclaimed works of fiction.[5]
She adopted the pen name Ellen Douglas before the publication of A Family’s Affairs to protect the privacy of two aunts, on whose lives she had based much of the plot.[6]
Douglas died of heart failure at the age of 91 on November 7, 2012.[6]
Margalit Fox writes that Douglas's work "explored the epochal divide between the Old South and the New, examining vast, difficult subjects — race relations, tensions between the sexes, the conflict between the needs of the individual and those of the community — through the small, clear prism of domestic life."[6]
